coolest cs class activity I have had

So I am in a senior level software engineering class which is one of the last pre requisites to graduating and we have a young very new professor who is honestly probably 10x better than any prof I have had to this point. So anyhow, he was explaining the SDLC which is a huge goal of the course and he said that instead of taking a quiz we would do a class activity wherein we went through a small example of a full process. He ended up showing us this video in class...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A48AJ_5nWsc

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If you are unfamiliar, this is a scene from Silicon Valley which is 10/10 HBO show about start up culture and one of the better shows I have ever watched. In the scene the characters buy a new smart fridge that irritates the very pessi-realistic Gilfoyle who goes on to brute force the password to the fridge and override the OS with a rather crude gif. What is cool about this is that the tech actually isn't too far off. Ok, a 10 digit alphanumeric probably is not going to be cracked in a matter of hours with a garage server and software is probably in place to lock the ip source out after too many failed attempts, but the code at the end of the video is actually pretty good.

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Anyway, we then spent the class separating into teams to accomplish different elements of this using the agile process. Some wrote an algorithm to brute force a decidedly 7 digit numeric passcode that would be verified for ample time complexity. Another set wrote the unit tests to verify correctness. Another set used the professors "Developer Wiki" for a fictitious smart fridge to understand how to override the system effectively. I was a part of this team and wrote the function to replace with my meme of choice, which of course given the circumstances I made be Erlich in the pied piper costume. At the end another group of system builders tied everything together to create a baseline version and pushed to the repository. Professor ran the program on his system and we watched as it "invaded" the fridge and displayed our meme.

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That was the coolest thing I have ever done in class. I learned more in that hour than I probably learned in 2 years of dinosaur professors lecturing on things I wouldn't use very often post graduation. If you are in a position to teach younger developers how to do things, take a note here, could change the way we see the industry.